<b>Pinned messages stop working faster than you think</b>

<b>Pinned messages stop working faster than you think</b>

Pins are the default tool for making information persist. Their actual half-life as an attention surface is short.

<b>What the data shows</b>
Where click-through on pinned links has been measured, engagement concentrates in the hours after pinning and decays steeply within days. A pin that's been up for weeks gets near-zero new clicks — regulars have learned to ignore the pin icon, and newcomers don't think to check it. Pins behave less like permanent signage and more like a fading announcement.

<b>Why it happens</b>
Attention habituates. A static element in a high-change environment gets filtered out — the same banner-blindness documented in web advertising. Pins compete with a live, moving timeline and lose.

<b>Discord vs Telegram</b>
Telegram's single sticky pinned bar at the top of a chat is more visible than Discord's tucked-away pin list, so Telegram pins likely decay slower — but still habituate.

<b>The caveat</b>
Click data captures only link-pins; informational pins read without clicking are invisible to this measure, so decay may be overstated for text.

Open question: if pins habituate, is periodic re-pinning (or re-posting) the only way to keep critical info alive?